Art Of The Day Weekly

#523 - from 16 July 2018 to 5 September 2018


Saburo Murakami, Work, 1960, oil on canvas, plywood, 183,2 x 139,7 cm
 © Tomohiko Murakami, Courtesy of the Estate of Saburo Murakami and ARTCOURT Gallery Collection of Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art (The Yamamura Collection).

Japanese fury

RODEZ – Happening, performances, Action Painting: we think they were all invented by American artists. Well, actually, the Japanese were the first to develop these artistic expressions. The audacity of a group of young artists in a country still under reconstruction, ten years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, impressed Fluxus and Yves Klein. The members of the group Gutai, -which means approximately “concrete” - around their elder, Yoshihara, were true iconoclasts, making holes in canvases, rolling themselves into the pigments or painting with their feet while suspended from a rope. As part of the “Japonismes” season in France, some forty works are being shown at the Musée Soulages, on loan from the Hyogo museum in Kobe, including a lovely selection of Shiraga, who recently broke his record during an auction at Sotheby’s. One of the last members of the group, Matsutani, living in Paris, explained during the inauguration the energy of these artists who rebuilt on a clean slate.
Gutai, l’espace et le temps at the musée Soulages, from 7 July to 4 November 2018.

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